One of the benefits of being in the family! With the enthusiastic cooperation and support of Paramount Pictures Promotions department, Deployment Strategy will have 2 screenings next week in Times Square in the Viacom building! Both will be private, invite-only screenings (in compliance with most film festival rules)

CLARIFICATION: FREE FOR ALL VIACOM EMPLOYEES! You do NOT need an invite if you work for Viacom, just show up :D I have invited the whole company which puts me safely within festival rules :D .

Thursday, August 16th at 12:30 pm will be the Viacom Employee Screening for people in the company. Friday, August 17th at 8pm will be the Cast & Crew screening. I'm so psyched for both of them!

That's the poster I made on the left that's hanging on walls all over the office! There's a huge version after the jump too...

w00t!! it's finally done! For past month, work on 3D animated shots has been rapid fire. I wanted to post some progress shots, but decided to wait until it was all complete to show you the finished work along with progress shots.

Why? Cuz there will inevitably be someone who watches a pre-vis sequence and snickers, "the resolution is so low!!!" when the point is to focus on composition, blocking, and animation. so here's the reel of final shots.

In the coming days, i'll have more stills and materials in this post to show you how it all unfolded. for now, click read more and enjoy the shots!!

Gizmodo today has such a great post about a new South Korean campaign for robot rights!! It gave me the jeebs cuz Deployment Strategy touches on this exact thing in the future where AI is not only possible but wide spread on the torrents and P2P networks!! I was compelled to post the article link here as well as this clip from the film after the jump!

So for those new to this filmmaking stuff, concept art is created during the pre-production phase to try and capture the director's vision for things - sets, costumes, props, etc - that need to be created for the film. In uber-budget films like Star Wars, there may be a huge team of concept artists with different skill sets that crank out ideas under the director's guidance. So George Lucas may say, "We're going to see Chewbacca's home planet for the first time. I want his Wookie species to live on a non-industrialized planet in the woods. They're technology should be sparse and heavily grounded in wood and organic elements. GO!" And the concept artists will sketch a brazilian ideas for him and Lucas will filter through them with nods and umm's and nah's, and the nods will continue to be refined until the idea fleshed out completely is approved and the concept art becomes more of a blue print for the production/creative team that will realize the idea. So to use the Wookie planet again, the wood-based props and costumes will be made by a prop/wardrobe department and images of the planet and woods may go to the digital art department for digital matte creation. That's basically how it works. Concept art is often thought of as rough and quickly thrown together, but if you've ever seen concept art from Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, your head would explode because it's soooo darrrn gooood. [artbyfeng.com best concept artist I've seen! Know of any others? Add them as a comment here!]

Anyway, I didn't have the budget for a concept artist and basically did all the concept art myself for the prop maker, effects team, and 3D designers. Since we were such a small crew, a lot of the concept art was just for myself since I had to do a lot of art department work!! I've included almost all concept art I have here on this page below and have added descriptions for you.